Entrepreneurs Ask Feds for More Data

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the agency's latest liberation of data from its vast trove of healthcare information this week, making public for the first time price and quality specifics for 30 different outpatient procedures at hospitals nationwide.

But this data stream is not big enough or fast enough for some entrepreneurs.

"Thank you, Secretary, for releasing 30 of 30 million things you need to release," chided Jonathan Bush, CEO of practice management and health data company AthenaHealth.

Sebelius, who was speaking at the annual Health Datapalooza conference Monday in Washington, told Bush and hundreds of other tech entrepreneurs that the Obama administration is "a great believer that unlocking our data, turning it over to those of you that know how to formulate that data for policymakers and providers, is the best possible thing to do."

But Bush said the federal government also could learn from the private sector in how it shares valuable price and quality intelligence with entrepreneurs. Health plans, he added, are a lot more forthcoming with the kind of information care-management companies like his need to steer patients to the best value and avoid inefficient operators.

Datapalooza is an effort by "data liberators" in government, academia, and private industry to build pressure for more access to healthcare information like utilization rates, geographic anomalies, and just about anything else the government and private industry knows about patients, payers, and providers. The idea is that, in the hands of creative entrepreneurs, "lazy data" can be transformed into innovative new products and services.

The "conditions are aligned unlike they've ever been aligned before," for healthcare transformation, said Steven Krein, a tech entrepreneur and co-organizer of Datapalooza. Out-of-control healthcare costs and Affordable Care Act initiatives to drive them down are creating new opportunities for data scientists to reduce waste and inefficiency, making money for themselves from the savings they can deliver to health plans, healthcare providers, and patients.

Hospitals are willing to pay for new computer modeling software that predicts, for instance, which patients are most likely to be readmitted within 30 days of discharge. Government penalties for high readmission rates are creating that incentive, and if programmers can create effective models that cost less than hospitals would pay in penalties, hospitals come out ahead. So do patients, who benefit by not having to return to hospitals. Health plans win by not having to pay for readmissions.

"Healthcare is very backward," said technology venture capitalist David Jones of Chrysalis Ventures. The industry is probably 2 decades behind purely digital companies like Google and big retailers like WalMart in terms of being able to gather and analyze consumer data and use it to adapt to market demand and improve efficiency and competitiveness, he said.

More than 60 entrepreneurs showcased new data-driven healthcare applications at Datapalooza.

Mike Galbo and Russ Graney, who have no previous experience in healthcare, dove into health data after having bad experiences watching loved ones struggle in less-than-ideal rehabilitation facilities.

"A nurse from the hospital presented us a list of all the providers in the area with their phone numbers and addresses, and said to us, 'I'm going to be back in an hour, tell me where you want your uncle to go,'" Graney said. He got out his smartphone, but couldn't find good information to help him shop for the right facility and ended up picking the one closest to home. Substandard care there, he said, meant his uncle had to be readmitted to the hospital a short time later.

So Graney and Galbo combined HHS data with information they gathered on their own to create an online shopping tool that made quality ratings and patient reviews easy to find and use. They're piloting it in four hospital systems this year, and expect that by this fall it will be used to place about 30,000 patients in post-acute-care facilities.

This article, which first appeared June 6, 2013, is part of a collaboration that includes Colorado Public Radio, NPR, and Kaiser Health News. It was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.